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"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
- Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871)

Recent Entries

Lately I've found myself fascinated by minimalist D&D rules like "Searchers of the Unknown" and its worthy successor "1974 Style". I also like the d20-only philosophy of True20 and Numenera's Only Players Roll principle. All three have collided in my brain to create the following incomplete rules:

Every character, player or NPC, has a Level, which denotes attack, defense, and miscellaneous physical prowess. PCs start at 1, as usual.

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et

Recently I've been playing The Strange with a reasonably stable group. Yesterday I had an idea for a space-opera style recursion (parallel world for the rest of the gaming world), and having nobody else to tell I'm telling you. Don't you feel special?

The problem with wedging an entire galaxy, or even a solar system, into one of the Strange's recursions is that recursions are supposed to be small, much smaller than Earth, so that the GM isn't madly mapping planets for every adventure.

For those of you who don't know what "sword and planet" is, it's science fiction in which our lone Earthling hero is thrown onto an alien planet with generally low technology and must fight to survive. Examples include Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series (A Princess on Mars, etc.) and some of Jack Vance's work (particularly the Planet of Adventure series). The excuse for swords being the weapon of choice varies from decaying cultures to alien oppressors.

Just to toss out a topic (or possibly sweaty dynamite) ... what's the general opinion on "evil races" in games? By which I mean entire intelligent species whose sole purpose is essentially to kill/enslave/annoy humans.

As one might gather, I'm not a fan. My first problem is that real-world societies have attributed two-dimensional malice to their enemies far too often, with tragic results, and